Your cat might see you as an app already!

Also, Windows coined programs as apps, so pretty much any application may now be called app.

Thank you very much. I’ll check it out and try to get used to it when the next photo needs retouching.

https://onecameraonelens.com/2022/08/02/quickly-get-a-workable-image-in-darktable/ seems promising as well. I guess I already figured that out myself at some point but maybe following a guide will show me what I might’ve been doing wrong or in a wrong order or something…

Just a few thousand kilometers off, though I might make it there one day and check it out! :)

Yeah Darktable is the way to go from what I’ve gathered so far. At the very least in terms of freeware. I can tell that it does a lot of things very well and offers endless features. I’ve already played around with it previously and use it exclusively now since I’ve switched my mainOS to Ubuntu and can’t use Lightroom anymore. I did enjoy Lightroom’s pre-sets that are offered by default. Filters and such. It helps getting some inspiration in what way the image could be modified to convey itself better.
I’m sure similar filters exist for Darktable as well but it’s not as much point-and-click as Lightroom I guess.

Do you know if there are camera (manufacturer) specific modules for Darkroom that can be used? Would be nice to 1-click-recreate what my camera did for the .jpg and go from there. I think it’d help me a lot to adjust the image I’ve already evaluated instead of starting ‘from scratch’ regarding pretty much all image data, you know?

Tried something with Darktable. As usual, I got quite frustrated with my ability to change things in a way I feel to be in control of. Well at least monsieur le bird seems to be shown in a less exposed way:

Thank you for the reply.
Moving the sliders of the histogram is the one thing I’ve been able to do myself without ‘messing up’ the image. Will try it for this pic as well.
Working with masks is something that really makes sense for such instances but it kind of feels like cheating to edit this way. Maybe I’m just to hung up on the idea to keep photos close to the real thing, whatever that might be.
Using the .jpg my camera creates already contains lots of adjustments…

I should have the RAW file somewhere. Since editing myself usually ends in disaster… Should I just lower overall exposure until the bird stops appearing overoxposed or should I try lowering highlights separately or something?
Tips would be appreciated.